On
Sunday,
the 5th of June 1813 in the hamlet of Grünebach a son
is born to Johann Peter Baldus and his wife Elizabeth. They call
him Eduard.He is their heir,
and after her daughter Catherine their second child - and six more should
follow until 1832.At the time of Eduard's birth Napoleon's
grenadiers had occupied parts of Sayn-Altenkirchen in the Duchy
of Nassau in Germany. However, in those days nobody imagines that France
will be Eduard's destiny. Why should it? Napoleon's Russian campaign fails
and with the wars of liberation still in the course of Edward's year of
birth, Blücher's Prussians with their allied Russians march into the area.
A few years later Grünebach also legally becomes a part
of Prussia.

Almost nothing is known
about Eduard's childhood and youth in Grünebach, where everyday life was
dominated by agriculture, handicrafts and the hard and

hot smelting works in the Grünebacherhütte. Probably, Eduard attended the Catholic school,
which Grünebach and Sassenroth operated together.
Since in Prussia each man of twenty years of age was liable to military
service for years

anyway, it seems that Edward
as a young man used the opportunity to join
voluntarily the army already earlier. Now he is a soldier, a bombardier in
the Prussian army in the Rhine Province, one of the gunners who served the
mortars and howitzers, had the rank of Chief Gunner and was subordinate to
the officers. But this is not the life Eduard Baldus had dreamed of.

And so, it is not the
risk of his job as a soldier, which nearly will
cost him his life and becomes the starting point of analmost unbelievable life story. He leaves the
army and Cologne...